AHC: Beria in charge of the USSR

zhropkick

Banned
I was reading the Wikipedia page on Lavrentiy Beria (I'm not going to pretend to be knowledgeable on the USSR here because it's not warranted) and found it hilarious that he was such a terrible person. Apparently he was a serial rapist, and if his victims resisted they would be buried in his wife's garden. According to Kruschkev's memoirs, he also spat on an unconscious Stalin after the guy had a stroke. Sometimes reality is stranger than anything it would be acceptable to come up with in fiction.

In OTL he was given a show trial and executed after Stalin's death. How could history be changed in a way that would get Beria long-term in charge of the USSR following Stalin's death instead of Khrushchev and Co.? What happens with such a giant piece of shit in charge of one of the world's two superpowers?
 
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The best possible chance I can see of Beria running the USSR is if somehow Stalin dies during WW2, and in the midst of the chaos Beria uses the secret police to arrest most of his rivals and asserts himself the new Premier and General Secretary. The problem though is Beria had waay too many enemies and Stalin being alive really only protected him, Beria was feared and hated by basically everyone in the Soviet Government so if Beria takes the reins, I can expect a lot of conspiracies against him.

On the other hand, if the Soviets make it to the end of WW2 victorious, Beria might let Germany and several Eastern European states go in exchange for Western economic aid thus delaying the Cold War. Though if he did this, I can expect him to "resign" due to health issues and then "unfortunately" dying of said "health issues" not much later.
 
Beria's only chance to gain power is through an outright coup IMO. His problem is that he was trying to build himself a political, not just a police base, and to associate himself with policies that might be popular, like a better deal for the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. *If* the struggle could have been kept on a political plane, this might make sense--nationally-minded cadres in the non-Russian republics might gradually be attracted to him. But as it was, his attempt to use the "nationalities card" not only did not benefit him (he got Melnikov removed as First Secretary of Ukraine for his Russifying policies, but Melnikov's replacement was Kirichenko--a Khrushchev man, not a Beria supporter) but helped to alarm his colleagues and make them more determined to get rid of him.

Was such a coup possible? One indication that the Presidium at least thought it was is that the commanders of the Moscow District (Pavel Artemyev), the City of Moscow (K. R. Smilov), and the Kremlin (N. K. Spridinov) were all replaced after Beria's fall. One interesting question, though: Would the military in the rest of the country (e.g., Leningrad, where Marshal Govorov was commander) accept the results of an MVD coup in Moscow?
 
It depends when Beria makes his move, but he certainly had the ability to grab power and hold on to it by simultaneous blood letting and relaxing controls. Beria, as received by us through Soviet post-Stalin history is a boogeyman to the Soviet sensibilities, a man driven to personal power (not for the betterment of others, the way a good Soviet dictator aught), sexually active (Soviet take on sexuality was Puritanical after the initial burst of post-Revolution giddiness), a rapist (getting labeled as an anti-social sex-mad deviant is a great way to get blackballed from the Soviet pantheon forever), and yet how much of it is true is a matter up for debate. The truth will never be known. Too many layers of lies and counter-lies and political reasons for lying. He was a killer and a shit, because he was in charge of the secret police in a police state, but were his hands any dirtier than those of Stalin's inner circle? We will never know. But there were no saints on the Presidium. They were all murdering bastards who justified the worst atrocities possible in the name of nonsense and holding on to power.

As for the Soviet Army... well, they could have been exploited and divided by Beria as much as any organization. There were a lot of egos in that organization as well. And though the War did transform them in the eyes of the public and in their own view, the senior leadership were all officers during the 1937 Purge and more than a few signed orders to have their brother officers killed for alleged crimes that defy all logic and common sense.

The problem with Beria wasn't that he was, or was not, a murdering sociopath rapist, it's that he completely misunderstood that at the end of the day he was viewed as a Himmler by his inner circle pals and then there was the ethnic thing. Beria was a Mingrelian, one of many, many tribes of people living in the Caucasus mountains, where every valley can house a separate ethnic identity and a long and bloody history of warfare with people from all the neighboring valleys. He was a minority of a minority in a nation where key positions were staffed by stolid Russians who held a dim view of most people from the Caucasus (Stalin being a major exception). They were inclined to believe the worst about him, because to a lot of them that what Mingrelians were - savages from the mountains, who wanna rape our white women and lord over us as power crazed chieftains. Having a creature such as that in charge? It offended sensibilities and made it all the easier to kill.
 
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